1. Technical Field
The embodiments herein generally relate to occupancy detection of a live object(s) and, more particularly, to a system and method for occupancy detection using differential image sensing and optical markers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Detecting whether a physical space or a location has been occupied by a person/object is of enormous value. By determining the occupancy information of a person or object the information can be used for wide variety of applications. Some of the applications where occupancy detection is useful are lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) control in buildings to use energy more efficiently depending on a particular room/space is occupied, home automation systems where specific actions like turning on/off the TV/Music system or other devices can be taken into consideration to determine whether a given room is occupied by a human being or not, intelligent burglar alarm systems which only detect motion of human sized objects and prevent false positives like pets etc., intelligent burglar alarm systems that are active only in certain parts of premises depending on the time of the day and space usage patterns, asset tracking where an object is tracked, when moved from a predetermined position to a new location, etc. It can also be helpful in an emergency safety application, where the system will tell a central console as to the number and location of live objects during an emergency such as fire, earthquake, etc. This will be extremely helpful if the emergency takes place during non-working hours and there are a small number of people to be rescued on from a building floor. Such application facilitates need for a robust occupation detection system with accurate tracking of moving or live objects.
Occupancy detection has been traditionally carried out in two different methods. First method is physically tagging the object that needs to be tracked by using RFID or other radio tags and while second method involves using active components or systems such as IR beams, motion sensors, physical switches, etc. installed in a physical area to track the motion of moving objects, whenever the moving objects interacts with any one of those sensors.
The problem with both these techniques is that the object that needs to be tracked is in some way has to interact with the tracking system. This creates problems like mechanical wear and tear of the tracking system, inventory tracking of the tags etc. Accordingly, there remains a need for a new technique where the moving or target objects are in no way interacting with the sensors or is attached to the object being tracked, but instead a system has to be installed in the physical location where the objects is tracked for occupancy without any direct contact or interaction with the tracking system.